The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  Ales Radomir dashed over to his teammate. He shoved people away and felt for a pulse in his long neck. He looked up at Mazaryk and let out a bullish huff through his nose. Mazaryk stood silently for a moment in the middle of the dance floor amid the screaming and scrambling. He sucked air through his teeth as he thought how this changed things, and then he walked over to the splayed body of the Silver captain, Yves Noel, and spat upon it.

  “You have no respect for this organization,” said Mazaryk, speaking into Yves’ dead ears. “Do you see what happens when you treat this like a game?”

  Slowly Mazaryk stood and looked around him. People pressed themselves against the far walls like terrified caged animals. Nobody moved against him, and he could see why. He counted fifteen people motionless on the floor, not including the three Frenchmen and his own striker. He knew his team had hit nine; the other six had to have been hurt in the rush to get away from the fray. Those would be the worst injuries.

  “You brought this upon yourselves! The blood of these innocents rests upon you and your foolish brothers,” Mazaryk hissed, bending low towards the still face of Yves once more. “Remember that when you wake up. Remember that you deserved this.”

  He stood and walked to where Ales was gently wiping the slack face of Goran Brander. He reached over and drew up one of Brander’s eyelids. There was only white. Then he walked to the door and out into the darkness of the derelict buildings, Ales close in tow. They could hear the approaching helicopters and saw that several flashing cars were already on the horizon.

  Team Silver was out.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “TOTALLY WIPED OUT. In a bad way.”

  Johnnie Northern rested his chin in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other. Team Blue was gathered together on the porch of a late-night coffee house ten minutes from the San Diego beach, just southwest of the UCSD campus. Nikkie Hix studied Northern. Max Haulden stirred his own coffee as he watched the leaves of a nearby wooded area rustle about under the street lights in the night wind.

  “But they got Brander,” Northern said. “No small feat.”

  “Really!” said Hix. “Brander hasn’t been hit for quite a while. How did that happen?”

  “They shot it out in a dance club in east Paris. It’s a mess. Didn’t take Black very long to move, did it?” Northern asked, looking at Max, who still looked elsewhere.

  “So France is out,” Max said, smiling cryptically as he swirled around the dregs of his coffee. “What an stupid plan, to hide in a dance club. They must have been drunk. A band of fools.”

  “Fifteen civilians injured. They opened up on the crowd. Indiscriminately. Destroyed the place. A million and a quarter in fines, according to Greer’s report,” said Northern.

  “My God,” whispered Nikkie. “What happened?”

  “Mazaryk’s insane, that’s what happened. He’s turning this organization into a gang war. Things are changing. Greer says we should stay heads up,” said Northern.

  “The Japs are coming?”

  “From what I can tell Red ain’t moving at all,” Northern said, before yawning hugely. He tapped the table top rapidly and leaned back in his seat, hands behind his head. “Teams are moving all around us, yet we sit. And drink coffee,” he added, tipping his cup and squinting into the grounds as if to read the future.

  “John, we agreed. It would be stupid to move on them. If we don’t move, we have to wait, it’s the name of the game,” Max said.

  “Yes. The waiting game,” Northern said, his voice only briefly betraying his annoyance before he smiled again. “I’ve never been much good at the waiting game.”

  Max furrowed his brow and was about to speak again when a woman who was passing by their table suddenly hitched up and leaned backwards to look at them. All three turned to her.

  “John?” she asked.

  “Sarah,” said Northern, as he might speak the name of a song or a movie that he’d struggled to remember all day. He stood. Nikkie looked from him to this new girl, her face a careful mask. She thought the greeting awfully familiar. She was unnerved. It was the nature of their work that each should know of the other’s contacts in the places in which they stayed. And she was beautiful. She immediately disliked the woman.

  Max looked up at Sarah blankly, annoyed at the interruption but willing to wait. He briefly eyed two others, her friends no doubt, who stood a polite distance away. No danger there.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” said Sarah, eyeing the other two at the table uneasily. Only Northern smiled, his teeth pointed and white in the gathering night.

  “I thought you were gone for good,” she said.

  “Work has been busy, but I’m always around.” His eyes were but blue glints in the dark, yet she found herself looking away and back again.

  “Fair enough,” she said, nodding and fussing with the zipper on her coat. It was unlike her to avert a gaze. She felt foreign to herself; laid bare. She looked at him again in self-defiance.

  He smiled, drawing out the silence before speaking. “These are my associates, Max and Nicole.”

  Northern nodded at each in turn. Max offered a half smile so as not to look overly disinterested. To him this was an interference; they were essentially on the clock and this wasn’t part of their job. But the competitive spirit within Nikkie was stirred. She stood up, flashed a southern smile, and stuck out her hand.

  “Very nice to meet you. John has said good things about you,” she said, shaking her hand with three brisk pumps.

  Sarah looked from Hix to Northern and blinked. “Has he?”

  “I did mention that I met you,” he said softly, eyeing Hix, who still smiled at Sarah. Sarah was confused as to where she should look, so she settled upon Max, who was focusing on the tree again.

  “Well, I’ll have to keep an eye out for you then. If you’re around, I mean,” said Sarah.

  “I have to leave for a few days, for work, but I’ll be back,” Northern said, dipping his gaze to beg her pardon. Max and Nikkie stared at him. He looked only at Sarah.

  “Good luck,” she said. “I should head out.” She gestured back at her friends still waiting just beyond, smiled a farewell, and walked off.

  His two teammates still watched him. He turned back to them.

  “What’s all this now?” Max asked flatly. “Are we going somewhere? Did you not just say we wait? What was all this talk about sticking out like a sore thumb over there, and making easy targets and whatnot?”

  Nikkie, more concerned about Sarah than any newly formed travel plans, judged it best to wait to bring up the girl. She settled for cocking an eyebrow at her captain. Northern took in a breath and exhaled slowly.

  “Waiting has its merits,” began Northern.

  Max rubbed his eyes, already weary with the travel he now knew was coming.

  “... But it rarely gets anyone anywhere,” Northern finished with flourish.

  Max could only shake his head. His captain had made up his mind.

  “Pack your bags,” Northern said. “We’re going to Japan.”

  Chapter Twenty

  IN THE BEGINNING, TAKURO Obata doubted his team. They didn’t look anything like he expected. These men weren’t muscular, nor did they look particularly menacing in the way certain stringy men can look. Amon Jinbo, his striker, looked like a prepubescent boy, dressed in clothes too large, with thick black plastic eyeglasses that seemed about to fall off of his face. Initially Obata thought something might be mentally wrong with the boy as well. He fidgeted too much, often scratching absently at his hands. When he stood, he draped one arm across his body and onto his opposite shoulder as if he was holding himself—a posture borne out of a lack of confidence. He looked weak. Obata recalled thinking that the boy was nearly cradling himself.

  His sweeper was a different character altogether and no more promising at first glance. Tenri Fuse spoke like a pervert, drawing out certain odd words in his sentences and enunciating others with undue care while
petting his thin strip of a goatee. He craved attention and was a strutting spectacle unto himself. Obata remembered thinking that if these men were expected to do what he thought they were supposed to do, and what the Tournament told him they were supposed to do, Japan was in a lot of trouble.

  But what must he have looked like to them? He rarely spoke, and often caught himself staring blankly at nothing. His mind was always working, but how were they to know that? They probably thought him boring, or worse, stupid. When he did speak, his voice was low and soft. Perhaps they thought this betrayed weakness. He was no storybook general. He would never be the one to deliver a rallying speech as the three of them faced the breach. He’d been told he often scowled when he was lost in thought, so they may have thought him an angry, brooding man. Thankfully these first impressions, whatever they may have been, no longer mattered. Appearances were deceiving. They now knew exactly what each was capable of.

  The tipping point, the point when Takuro Obata was fully able to say to himself that all three of them were an unbroken circle—a team that was three made one instead of one made of three—came when he took them into the mountains of Toyama prefecture, almost a year after they met:

  The three trudged up the pathless wilderness in single-filed silence, soaked through to the bone as they parted the masses of greenery with their bare hands. Pollen and dirt dripped down their exposed faces, arms, and legs in rivulets of fine yellow and brown grit. It had beaded upon the dull metal of their newly acquired guns and, like paint, streaked the leather of their holsters. Every so often one of them spit to clear their mouth. Amon Jinbo had long since stopped trying to clean his glasses, and instead peered out through their grimy lenses half blind, trusting the direction of his captain in front of him. As Tenri Fuse, the last in line, passed though the greenery, it closed behind him like a theatre curtain, solid and undulating.

  For two hours they trudged uphill in silence, through the roiling mist that fell down the mountain as the cool night air met the hot overgrowth all around them. As they climbed higher the vegetation thinned out by degrees, but so slowly that when the team first stopped both Fuse and Jinbo looked around themselves bewildered by the change. Thin-trunked bamboo trees stood in clumps, straining to find what sunshine the massive canopies of Red Cedar leaves allowed them. Here and there animals of all kinds had torn the spongy undergrowth in swaths to reveal dark mulch beneath. All around them the cicadas were awakening in the dark, each of their saw-like calls melting into one another to form one long, continuous scream.

  As the red rays of the setting sun sliced through the trees, elongating their shadows east and up the mountain, Obata found a carved rock. It was surrounded by four other rocks of similar size, all devoid of moss and dirt, and rounded to a smooth egg shape. On the rock were written the characters Heiwana Tooge. Restful Road. Obata seemed to have been looking for it, because after sighting it he turned around and gave a rare smile to his two teammates.

  “Just ahead,” he said.

  Five minutes later the three turned a sharp corner around a jutting boulder and came upon a simple gazebo that was invisible even ten paces back. Four worn oak poles held up a small pointed roof of thatched grass and mud. It sheltered a flat, square patch of land in which dwelt a simple and beautiful garden of sand and stone. In the middle of the garden a small monk was raking very slow and precise circles in the sand around a flat center stone of pure white. Fuse and Jinbo froze, as much out of surprise at finding such a secluded, secret place as out of respect. They feared that perhaps they would startle him and ruin the sanctity of everything in front of them. The monk continued his infinitely slow raking until he reached the precise area in which he had first set rake to sand. When he saw that the grooves in the sand fit perfectly together, he stood and turned without surprise to look at the three men. When he saw Obata he smiled so widely that the wrinkles of his face seemed to fall upon themselves and squeeze his bright eyes shut of their own accord.

  “We’ve come, grandfather,” Obata said, gesturing openly at the men to either side of him.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the old man said. He stepped deftly from rock to rock, his wooden sandals clacking once upon each, and alighted upon the forest ground. He wore a swath of burnt-orange cloth that wrapped around one shoulder and hung barely above the ground. His other shoulder was bare and brown. His geta sandals were worn clean of lacquering. His head was completely bald, devoid even of the beginnings of stubble. He took one look at each of the three men in turn, all of whom bowed deeply, before setting off to the right of the garden towards a small wooden building in the near distance. With one hand he held up the hem of his robe like a debutante might, and with the other he motioned for the three men to follow.

  The wooden building was the monk’s sleeping quarters, but also doubled as an outdoor noodle shop and bar. Whom it might serve in this wilderness, none could say. It was a simple structure of worn wood. The side facing the garden was opened and had a single, slightly uneven wooden bar-top that ran its length at about waist height. Two polished stumps acted as stools. The three men stood and waited while the monk went into his house by the back and came to the bar. But instead of serving them, he moved to the back corner of the shack’s interior and dug in the soft earth there with his cupped hands. Minutes later he withdrew a small clay jug from the ground, blew on its label to clear it of dirt, and eyed it at arm’s length. He nodded to himself and rose to his feet holding it out before him. He grabbed three small sake cups and turned to the men waiting outside.

  “Bring a stump,” he croaked, and gestured behind him to the forest beyond. “Come, come, come,” he chirped.

  Obata nodded at Amon Jinbo, who picked up one of the stumps in front of him and held it ponderously to his chest, leaning back so as not to pitch himself over. He eyed Obata with one cocked eyebrow as his bulky glasses slid to the tip of his nose. Tenri Fuse was absorbed in the fairytale scene, his head swept slowly this way and that as if he expected a talking animal or other living mythology to materialize from the low-lying mists. Obata walked around the shack and his team followed, the old monk was already many steps ahead near the border of the mists and wasn’t looking back.

  They followed the monk to a flat section of the mountain that might at one time have been a place in which crops grew as part of a tiered block of farmland, but had long since been abandoned to the elements. The monk, or somebody, had carved steps out of the earth leading up to the flat slice of land; each step was paved with small white pebbles. At the top of the steps a section of the flat land was hacked clean of brush and vegetation and re-sown with a soft lichen of vibrant green. The monk removed his wooden sandals and stepped upon it and immediately began to examine its parameters for upkeep. The three men removed their shoes as well, and their socks, and walked upon the lichen with their bare feet. It was like walking on a heavy liquid; a thick cream of green. The monk motioned for Jinbo to place the stump he carried in the center of the lichen patch, and when he did, the monk placed the sake gourd and the three cups upon it. Obata thanked the monk and gave him a small brown parcel. The monk bowed and withdrew, stepped deftly into his sandals and then flitted off into the mist below.

  Obata looked at the two men for a moment. They said nothing.

  “Sit,” Obata said quietly, folding himself into a cross legged position on the ground.

  Jinbo and Fuse sat so that all three of them surrounded the low stump and the sake. Obata poured his partner’s cups full, replaced the sake, and then took out his gun and set it next to the cups. Jinbo eyed it warily, but Fuse picked up the sake again to fill his captain’s cup. Once done, he set the gourd back down and he too removed his firearm, a long and thin-barreled Smith and Wesson 622 that resembled a target pistol. He placed it on the stump next to Obata’s gun before grasping his cup.

  Jinbo paused and pushed his glasses up and scratched at himself before he, too, took out his bulky chrome Colt Anaconda .45 revolver and set it on the stump where it overhung th
e edge a bit. He then took out a second gun, a standard issue Colt .45 automatic, and set it upon his first. He took up his cup and then he sat back and eyed both of his guns. They seemed particularly ugly in this place.

  Then Obata spoke. “I’ve seen you work and train this past year, and you’ve seen me,” he began, speaking awkwardly into the glass held out in front of him. “I know your strengths and your weaknesses and you know mine.” He paused. He seemed to ponder elaborating, but then decided against it. He was unaccustomed to speeches and a great believer in the economy of words. “Let us first drink to that knowledge. That we have come to know each other and those weapons in front of us.”

  He rose his cup a notch higher in silence, and then all three drank the sake down at once. Obata took the cups and the gourd of sake and set them aside on the ground.

  “If I know anything about what lies before us, it is that gunfire is but a small part of the competition—a fraction! More, it is a pitting of wits. The battles are won or lost before the actual match begins.”

  Both men were watching him. That he should be this enigmatic when it was not normally his custom to speak at all concerned them. As Jinbo saw it, people started philosophizing only when they wanted to announce something serious in a roundabout way. Jinbo was beginning to believe all of this Tournament nonsense, to really and truly grasp that he would be devoting his life to this cause, but his grip was precarious. If it was all the same, he would just as soon have Obata return to his stoic, inwardly seething self.

  “When we win, it will be because we are more prepared than our opponents in every way,” Obata continued as he slowly reached for his gun. “And if we ever lose, it is because our opponents are more prepared than us.”